When Home is... Old Plates

It started when we dug up a broken piece of a plate in the back garden late last year. The pale blue floral pattern captivated me and I couldn’t help but wonder which owner it belonged to. It looked old, the pattern delicate, but surely it wasn’t a plate of John and Elizabeth Liddell’s?



Or was it? After all, they had seven children back in the 1890s so I imagine there were many broken plates over the many years they lived here. The kitchen/scullery would have been out the back, near where we dug up this piece of china, but who knows.

It could just as easily been from the owners who lived here in the 1990s and, from what I can work out from old plans, added the back living / kitchen room. After our recent renovation I have realised how many bits of rubbish – nails, screws, cigarette butts – can inadvertently end up buried under the rose bushes and gardenias... Yet, I like to think of this broken plate as a link from the present back to where it all began. The first family who called this house home.

When I found this bit of china I had already been thinking that we needed new dinner plates. Ours were all white and increasingly becoming chipped and crazed. I hadn’t been able to decide on the style of dinner set I wanted but now I knew.

While it was pure fantasy to try and find the exact match for this dug up piece of china, I knew I wanted old, English style plates and serving bowls.



It didn’t take long to start my new collection... finding a couple of blue and white china plates at the markets one weekend, some green ones at the same market another weekend. And once you start a collection it’s hard to stop really, isn’t it?

Collections run in our family and when my mother turned 40 she decided that for her party she would ask everyone to bring a plate. Not a plate of food but a plate. A plate of her friend’s choice, she would display on the lounge room wall. I think some of her friends were dubious, worried about whether they would find one she would like, one that would match the others but that wasn’t the point.

It had to be a plate her friend loved. Perhaps it was one they already owned or one they found at a garage sale or junk shop. That way it would become a plate representing that person. Instead of a wall of photos of her closest friends, she would have a wall of plates.

What none of us anticipated was how much those plates would come to act like photos. It’s amazing what a pattern, colour choice and age of a plate can tell you about someone’s personality. To this day I can stand in front of those plates and know the story behind each one.

It’s these stories behind objects that make them feel so precious. When I brought home a stack of old, slightly crazed, square dessert plates with a faded gold border and little green flowers painted around the sides a few months ago, I washed them and left them to dry on the side of the sink.

While talking to my sister on the phone, I noticed the children kept coming perilously close to them. Our conversation was punctuated with me shouting across the room ‘Watch those plates!’



My sister laughed, wondering how much I had paid for them to make me so nervous.But it wasn’t the fact they cost me $1.50 each (!) that made me nervous. It was the fact that I was already attaching myself to the story behind them; the morning spent fossicking at the market and finding them stacked unlovingly in a plastic tub was just the beginning of our life together. I was already imaging the future meals with friends and family when they would make their appearance. But what about the life they already had?



How did they end up as someone’s rubbish when once they would have looked quite grand? They may have been a part of someone’s wedding china. China only brought out for Christmas or birthdays for a family long, long ago.

A family like the family who first lived here.

And now a family like ours.

When Home is... the Dining Room

Recently I went to an open house with a friend; a grand old house out of both our price ranges. It was grand for many reasons – hugely proportioned rooms, wrap around veranda, a butler’s pantry – but it was perhaps the dining room with its table for 12that made the house feel most grown-up. People don’t really dine in ‘dining rooms’ anymore, do they? Formal rooms are rarely a selling point these days and while, for me, the most exciting part of our recent renovation was creating a ‘dining nook’ I never envisaged us dining in a separate room to the kitchen.

I didn’t really think much about these thoughts... until I read House Thinking by Winifred Gallagher today. This book is all about the psychology of home; how home not only ‘reflects but also affects who you are.’

So, I was interested to realise how conflicted I truly am. My dining nook says more about me as a person than I ever realised.

‘Today when we ask ourselves, “What kind of people are we, and what kind of home do we want?” our different answers are often reflected in our dining space. If we think of ourselves and homes along the lines of “practical, friendly and casual”, we may decide that it’s silly to waste space on a dining room when most meals are eaten informally in kitchens. If we see ourselves as the kind of people who do things the right way, we may prefer to eat in a handsome formal dining room gleaming with silver...’

Ok, I get that. I would like to be considered as ‘practical, friendly and casual’ AND my new nook reflects this too. BUT, then Gallagher writes:

‘The idea that we may be judged by our dining room or even our wineglasses, or that we care about such judgments, is discomfiting. Yet at mealtime, most of us take some trouble – setting the table, pouring wine, making conversation, lighting candles – to remind ourselves and others that if we’re not to the manor born, we weren’t born in a barn either.’

Hmmm. On Saturday night we had friends over on the spur of the moment. We cooked pasta to watch in front of the rugby; a practical, friendly and casual meal to reflect our practical, friendly and casual selves.

Except we didn’t sit on the lounge to eat or gather around the island bench in a practical, friendly and casual manner; we sat in our dining nook using the ‘good’ cutlery and the ‘good’ plates, drinking red wine out of – albeit Ikea – wineglasses and looking over and around the vase of flowers in the middle of the table to see the game on the television.

Oh, and the children also came downstairs a couple of times to complain that we were talking and laughing too loudly.

Confusion abounds and perhaps it’s time to stop reading books about house psychology.

When Home is...a 1950s Dinner Party

It’s Saturday night. The children are asleep and dinner is finished. I am on the lounge enjoying another glass of wine while I read a book published during the 1950s. It’s titled the Australian Woman’s Complete Household Guide Illustrated. My husband is watching rugby and washing up. He cooked dinner too, as he often does. The scene in my home tonight does not echo the 1950s Home Entertainment scene I’m reading about.

Let’s play a game and pretend it’s a Saturday night in June 1956. After all, ‘a wise hostess will organise games in which all may join’ and such a game may make this blog post ‘go with a swing’. We’re having an informal dinner party, although I realise there are still ‘rules of etiquette to be followed in setting and arranging the dining table’.

We’re having dinner for eight. I will use a linen tablecloth as they are now more popular and I can’t use place mats as my table is most definitely not in ‘almost perfect condition’. (Didn’t children use textas in the 1950s?!) I will allow my place settings to be spaced so that my guests have sufficient elbow room and the base of my cutlery handles will be a ‘straight line one inch from the edge of the table’. The napkins will be folded in the ‘customary rectangular shape and placed at the left of the dinner forks with the fold outside’ and I will have a small vase of jonquils in the middle of the table, as flowers ‘are still and probably always will be the most suitable decoration for the centrepiece on the table’.



Because I want to be a good hostess, I will plan the seating arrangements beforehand. My husband and I will be at opposite ends of the table and we will separate married couples and seat the opposite sex alternately. Being the mid-1950s, the number of courses presented at dinner parties is ‘now very elastic’ and as my food will be ‘well chosen, beautifully cooked and presented’ I am apparently able to be as free as I like in the choice of dishes.



After our black coffee in demi-tasse and liqueurs are served at the table, a tray of drinks – whisky, gin, beer or soft drinks – will be brought into the living room before our guests leave.

BUT WAIT

As we don’t have a separate living room or dining room perhaps we shouldn’t be having this dinner party after all. I should have organised a buffet dinner party instead. All we will need to do is remove all the chairs and leave our dining table in the middle of the room. As a ‘buffet meal is mostly informal, the tablecloth can be gay and interestingly patterned and the centrepiece can be made up of flowers or fruit’. There are ‘no fixed rules for setting the table for a buffet party’ and ‘it needs comparatively little preparation’. It will be a much shorter evening too – 5pm – 7pm – ‘excellent for a hostess with many social commitments’. The only other preparation we will need to do is ‘fill all the cigarette boxes and see that there are matches and large ashtrays on occasional tables’.



Seems like it will be relaxed and fun evening, don’t you think? Well, perhaps not for me. I’ll still be busy working. At a buffet party food and drink will be the least of my worries. Once my guests arrive I’ll introduce them to each other and ‘put them at ease’. If there are a couple of late-comers, as always, I’ll have to ‘lead them to one group or another and see them established so that they will not feel embarrassed or ill at ease’. But what will happen if a ‘certain amount of group forming in corners grows into a number of impregnable private conversations’? A good hostess will not let this happen. This is a shame as I wouldn’t mind being a part of a few ‘impregnable private conversations’. However, because I am a good hostess I will ‘apparently casually drift into different groups in turn, drawing some together and breaking up others’.

Well, I hope everyone else had fun because I don’t know that I did. Our guests will leave, piling out our front door, gaily laughing and swapping phone numbers with one another and I imagine I will be exhausted. Hearing them say what a ‘wonderful hostess’ I am as they climb into their cars should be enough for me to want to entertain every Saturday night. After all, ‘to describe a woman as a wonderful hostess is the highest compliment that can be paid, for it means that the person so described has the capacity for taking pains; that she has tact and charm and a genuine interest in other people. The art of entertaining needs practice, and involves a great deal of hard work’.

Back here in 2010, with three children aged under six, I know myself too well and should have paid heed to the warning at the beginning of the Home Entertainment chapter: ‘She should never undertake more than she can accomplish with ease as the pleasure of guests will be spoiled if the hostess appears to be tired’. My wine is now finished and I head off to bed with renewed appreciation and wistfulness for a conversation with my Nanna. I don’t know how she, as a mother of four, managed it back then.




I’d love to hear some real-life 1950s entertaining stories. Please leave me a comment if you have any.

*All photos are taken from the Australian Women's Complete Household Guide Illustrated. Colorgravure Publications (The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd)